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Tonight, as I drove along the long stretch of road from Longview to Dallas, Texas, I couldn’t help but wonder how far away the horizon is.

Now, I’m not completely math illiterate, so I decided to figure it out. The problem is… My answer doesn’t seem right. Perhaps I have done something wrong. See if any of you find a mistake in my method:

Assumptions:
The Earth is perfectly round
Our test subject is 5.8 feet tall.
Because the Earth is so big, the distance ‘x’ (shown below) is a close enough approximation of the arc length and actual driving distance to the horizon.

Okay! Calculation time!
According to Wikipedia, the radius of the earth is an average of about 3956.545 miles * 5280 ft/mile=
20890557.6 ft

Add 5.8 feet to that and we get a hypotenuse of 20890563.4 ft

according to Pythagoras
20890557.6^2 + x^2 = 20890563.4^2

or

436415396838917.76
+
x^2
=
436415639169419.56

so x^2 = 24330501.8

x is about equal to 15566.96 ft

Divide by 5280 and we get… 2.948 miles. That’s so… short… did I do something wrong?

DINOSAURS!

This weekend was decidedly mixed.

Thanksgiving was, of course, splendid. Any holiday that pulls family together and offers two days off from work gets a recommendation from me. Friday after an exciting breakfast with Abby and Ted, I got a haircut and then tried to zip back to CT in time for Kung Fu. I didn’t make it in time, so instead I went to Tony and Paulette’s place for some pizza and some Guitar Hero III.

Most of Saturday was spent researching my paper.

Let’s talk paper for a second.

The class is international business. What I need to do is write a 10 page single spaced paper that talks about something relating to international business. I want to write about intellectual property. My original thesis was an attempt to try and show that the sharing of intellectual property with developing countries is better for mankind. But right now, after a few weeks of research I want to say that really… we need something totally different. Capitalism based intellectual property hoarding seems to work, but it’s not very efficient. Peer Production seems genius and super efficient, but there are some fundamental difficulties that relate to what sorts of markets can benefit from creative donated collaboration.

If we look through the Kaleidoscope of Geekery, we’ll notice that Star Trek operated off of a Peer Production basis where the characters were not rewarded with monetary funds but instead with notoriety. Of course they had replicators for food. Star Wars was a capitalistic society. Perhaps my thesis should talk about what changes would be necessary from our current international business system if we were to start engaging in intergalactic business.

Anyway, my changing my thesis to “we need something new” is weak. It’s not quite specific enough - nor does it have as much to do with international business. So with a monster paper due in four days… I don’t know what to do.

Continuing with the weekend, Saturday night I watched the new Die Hard movie with the Scott family. It was hilariously fun. Sunday was spent working on the paper, doing chores, and playing about two hours of Rockband.

Now, it’s totally cool if you want to criticize me for playing Rockband when I have a huge paper due because Rockband… is probably the most amazing game ever. With Shaun on the guitar and me on the drums… well… it was two hours of intensity like none other.

At lunch this week Jocelyn and I were talking about text fonts and cities. The question is: If you had to choose a font to describe a city in its entirety, what font would you choose? Let’s take a look at Hartford, first we’ll start simply by describing the city, then we’ll try to find a font that screams ‘Hartford’

Hartford has a lot of insurance companies. Not many people live in the city and it’s about as far as you can get from ‘college town.’ It’s reasonably clean and seems to be a growing city. It has a good museum scene. It’s somewhat modern but it’s kind of tough to drive around. The public transportation is poor at best, but there’s a decent amount of parking.

Now for fonts… start by checking out this monster image of fonts:

now… think Hartford.

Hartford is too modern for a Times New Roman and too formal to be anywhere near Wingdings. Courier New isn’t a bad choice, but I think Hartford has enough complexity to it to escape the burdensome scenario where each letter takes up the exact same number of longitudinal pixels.* And obviously, Hartford is not a script font.

Then there’s Ariel. Not a bad choice really, it doesn’t have any serifs (I don’t think Hartford is quite worthy of serifs). It might be just a tad bit too boring for Hartford. It shouldn’t be a bold or italicized font. Century is too classy. Helvetica… Helvetica could work. So could Raavi.

I think I prefer Raavi.

What font do you think best describes your city?

*there’s a word for this type of font. Anyone know it?

I just found out* I have a 10 page paper due in my international business class Friday. AND I had already agreed to go to Karaoke tonight. I hope ear bursting Journey tunes will provide enough energy for me to stay up for the next 60 hours to write this paper.

*we were actually told about this long ago**. I just forgot entirely until a classmate reminded me.
**long ago = about 4 weeks. But really. I just found out*(***)
***recursive footnotes!!!

Work and Academics have created a significant barrier to my levels of fitness.

Lunch: instead of going to the gym as I normally do… I’ve been working on work and working on homework

After work: instead of going to Kung Fu, I’ve been doing homework and going to class

It’s been really annoying. It’s like, I only have a certain number of skill points and I need to choose which abilities should be focused on. do I keep up with my academics and career? or do I get into super great shape. (pictorial representation of decision).

Writing this down has increased my determination to overcome this barrier. I will renew my efforts to maintain fitness, education, and career. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m having trouble with some annoying algebra.

Suggestions?

If you’re like me, you hate hate hate it when Windows automatically restarts your computer to install updates. Especially if you usually stay on top of updates and often have about 6 projects open on your computer that are ready and waiting to be destroyed by Windows XP.

Well, fear not good friends. I have researched the solution.

Step 1: go to Start -> Run
Step 2: type gpedit.msc

This will bring you to group policy editor.

Step 3: Go to: Administrative Template/Windows Component/Windows Update

See the “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates Installations“?

Step 4: Right click on that and go to properties.

Enable, and you’re done.

Badda-Bing. Take that Windows.

Anyone who loves music and would consider themselves a member of the “occasionally paranoid” club has likely wondered if their computer software is secretly plotting against them.

Old Man Schenk decided to prove it once and for all. He wrote a quick computer program (in Ruby!) and science ensued.

Enjoy!

Great job Ryan!

This link requires a look:

Quintessential Geekdom

March 14th (3/14) is, of course, Pi Day (3.14… get it?). so this made me wonder what other days are out there. Let’s take a looksie:

January 2nd - Apery’s Constant Day
January 3rd - Plastic Constant Day
January 4th - Porter’s Constant Day
January 5th - Lieb’s Square Ice Constant Day
January 6th - Golden Ratio Day
January 9th - Brun’s Constant For Twin Prime Day
January 13th - Viswanath’s Constant Day
January 18th - Khinchin-Levy Constant Day
February 5th - Feigenbaum’s Alpha Constant Day
February 7th - e Day (Napier’s Constant)
February 8th - Fransen-Robineson Constant Day
April 6th - Feigenbaum’s Delta Constant Day
May 5th - Nuclear Magnaton times 10^27 Day
May 6th - Stefan-Boltzmann Constant times 10^8 Day
June 2nd - Avogadro’s Number divided by 10^23rd Day
June 6th - Planck’s Constant times 10^34 Day
August 8th - Electric Permittivity of Free Space times 10^12 Constant Day
August 9th - Coulomb’s Constant divided by 10^9th Day
December 10th(^3) - Molar Mass of Carbon 12 Day

Some might disapprove of my decision to include either one or two digits for the ten’s and hundreth’s place holders. Example: 4.3 or 4.03 could both be taken as April 3rd.

My personal favorite might be Nuclear Magnaton times 10^27 Day.

I kind of like Molybdenum.

What’s your favorite?

A few weeks ago Roland posted a link to this game on his website. It’s a game where you try to balance the lower ball on the horizontal bar while bouncing the upper ball pong style.

I became obsessed with this game. Today, I achieved the impossible and snagged the 40 second title.

I have no idea what that French means. If anyone wants to translate, I’d appreciate it.

I’ve been learning a bit about water and its boiling tendencies at my work lately. I thought I’d share with you the Leidenfrost effect.

The Leidenfrost effect describes the boiling of water on a very hot surface. If you take water and throw it onto a moderately hot pan, the water sizzles away very quickly. If you take water and throw it onto a VERY hot surface something else happens: the water forms into droplets and dances around the pan. Instead of boiling off quickly, it actually takes a significant amount of time.

What’s happening here?

It turns out that when the water first hits the pan there is a momentary “initial liquid contact stage”* during which the water that strikes the pan turns into a gas. The rest of the water droplet then sits on top of the gas instead of directly on the pan.

Heat transfer from metal to water is pretty good, but if you have to go through a vapor barrier first the heat transfer capabilities drop significantly.

How is this useful? Well, amongst other things, it helps explain things like walking on coals. When you’re nervous and antsy, the sweat on your feet will create little Leidenfrost vapor barriers between your feet and the hot coals. I wouldn’t recommend trying it though, because if you’re calm and the heat isn’t enough to cause you to start sweating, you will be seriously burned.

*ASM Vol. 4 Heat Treating Metals Handbook

This weekend was A+ and not just because it contained nearly 10 hours of rock climbing.

Saturday I hit up the rock gym with Mechanical Pete and Simon the German. My arms were miserably sore from a Friday workout, but my hands were steel traps. I attempted a few 12’s, but didn’t have nearly as much success as last Thursday. I did come to a major realization regarding the 5.12 with which I have been struggling.

There is one particular move which is so perfectly awkward that it’s nearly impossible to do slowly. I’ve found that the discomfort level increases rapidly, almost to an asymptote, at that one move. See red line on graph:

The only way I can get through the crux is if I ride the comfort momentum and swing through the moment of difficulty, not unlike bridging the current spike on a MosFet. Note the blue line on the graph above. With this realization, I expect little difficulty in the future.

Saturday night I checked out Big Shot (a billy joel cover band) at the bar Rookies in Cromwell. I wasn’t entirely impressed with the bar, but the band was top notch. Their sound was so perfectly full. The singer sounded exactly like Billy Joel and the bassist had the most unbelievable look of apathy for most of the show.

Sunday, I zipped over to Main Cliff at Ragged Mountain and played with the routes Y.M.C. and Carey’s Corner. Devin, Irene, Mechanical Pete, Tony, Paulette, and Nick were there. It was a climbing party.

Carey’s Corner is a route that follows two unpleasent offwidths. An offwidth is a crack that is just a little too big to use a hand jam. Instead, you kind of have to stick half your body into the crack and torque your body to push against each side. Then you inch your way to victory any way you can.

It was a great weekend.

A link from Shaun McQuaid:

Aaarghhhhh!

Last night in my Dynamics class we solved for the lateral forces acting upon a pendulum.

It was rather interesting. A guy named Foucault accomplished this in the late 1800’s and now the pendulum experiment shares his name.

Read about Foucault Pendulums here.

I had a great weekend. Friday night after class I went home and spent some time with my folks (get psyched for a fantastic “Stories by Dad D” tomorrow). I got a hair cut and then spent some time with my sister, a friend, and the Schenk crowd. It was a very social day. I loved it.

Sunday I went climbing with Mark and Irene then spent three and a half hours battling advanced dynamics with a team of students.

Let’s get our geek on!

The problem was such:

A person fires a bullet into the air at angle a and an initial velocity of i cos a + k sin a (the projectile is being shot south). Solve for the position of the projectile when it lands taking into consideration the influence of the angular acceleration of the Earth on the projectile. Disregard air resistance.

Diagram anyone?

Although a huge pain in the butt, I think we figured it out. What made it mildly interesting is that the distance of the particle from the center of the Earth is changing for the duration of its air time. So the angular acceleration has to be a function of the particle’s height.

My Advanced Dynamics class will be pretty challenging. The difficulty will be worth it though just to hear my professor get super excited about Newton and Physics.

Let’s get geeky.

One thing the professor mentioned was Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), something I had known nothing about. I decided to do a little extra research on the matter and share it with the world.

We’ve all heard of Dark Matter. The big reason Dark Matter is believed to exist is because galaxies act a little funny. Let’s first look at things that aren’t galaxies… take for example our solar system.

Mercury is close to the sun. Because of this, the sun’s gravity influences this little planet more than the sun influences… say… Neptune. As a results, Mercury rotates much faster around the sun than the rest of the planets. Not only does it follow Newton’s law F=ma, it just makes sense.

Unlike our solar system however, all bodies in a galaxy move around the center at about the same speed. This doesn’t make ANY sense. If gravity is huge and imposing at the center of the galaxy, it should be weak and pathetic at the edge of the galaxy. Until 1981, everyone had assumed that the only explanation of this would be if there was some mass that we didn’t know about that was adding some muscle to the weak edges. And thus DARK MATTER was born.

Dark matter, as Newton followers believe, forms a ring around the galaxy that equalizes the gravitational forces. The result is that all bodies in a galaxy would rotate at the same speed. ta-da! problem solved!!

Mordehai Milgrom, an Israeli physicist, was NOT COOL WITH THIS.

Milgrom suggested that perhaps when the acceleration of F=ma is really tiny, things get funky.

Tiny is relative of course… but when we’re looking at galaxies, tiny accelerations could be pretty substantial by our standards. So Milgrom suggested F=ma be changed to:

F= m u(a/a0)a

There’s plenty of data on that equation on the internet, so if you’re interested I would recommend checking out this site.

The problem with MOND, is that it’s extremely hard to TEST. This is because we can’t really deal with a scale big enough to make accelerations really tiny. So far all scientists seem to be able to do is observe OTHER galaxies and say “hey… that one has constant speeds too.”

I have graduate class on Wednesday nights. I usually arrive a few minutes early and without fail the pre-class conversations are extremely geeky.

This week we talked about our calculator’s computing power. Last week we discussed pencil lead thickness preferences and the usefulness of watches with internal radial slide rules.

Who knows what’s in store for next week!

Some people search for the equations that can relate the different natural forces (gravity, electromagnetic, etc…) I have long been searching for the connection between business and engineering. Last night I was in my Thermodynamics class and I came up with an interesting way to link the two.

Accounting, and perhaps Economics in general, is a monetary (single/multi variable?) version of Thermodynamics.

Think about it! Both are based off of obtaining equilibrium, and both obey general laws.

The first law of Thermodynamics states dU=dQ + dW
Basically, that there is a delicate balance of Energy, work, and Heat.

The second law of Thermodynamics, as I understand it, states that energy types within a system will naturally balance themselves.

Thermodynamics is all about balance.

Accounting is also about balance. But instead of balancing Heat, Energy, and Work, we’re balancing Liabilities, Assets, and Productivity.

Economics brings in supply and demand, micro and macro markets, and opportunity costs. Thermodynamics has energy supply and demand between phase transitions, closed and open systems, and phase diagrams that allow for individual variable changes to obtain changes of state.

I think someday a direct correlation could exist. Just like between Mechanical and Electrical (F=ma…. V=IR) I think that there might be a perfect crossover between accounting (ultimately economics) and thermodynamics. The goal? perfect quantification of managerial decisions using equations from engineering.

I’m going to work on this some more. If anyone is willing to help me do some research, I’d greatly appreciate it. I really think I have something here.